A greater understanding of the population characteristics of sport horse populations is required to enable potential breed improvement programmes to be formulated correctly and be effective in their outcomes. To date limited research has been conducted into the UK sport horse population.

A selected group of progeny (n=339) sired by elite eventing stallions was examined. In the context of this study elite sires were defined as those that were ranked 1-10 by total lifetime points won by competing progeny up to the end of 2000 (British Horse Database, 2000). Comparative analysis was undertaken between the selected group and all competing eventing horses in 2000 (n=9387) (British Horse Database, 2000). Data collected for both groups included, total lifetime points won at eventing and dressage and total lifetime money won at show jumping. Basic descriptive statistics were produced for each data set (Table 1). Product moment correlations were performed for all discipline areas (Table 2). Data transformation was applied using LOG+1(Hassenstein, Roehe, and Kalm, 1996).